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Onyx Liscio micro mobile phone

Small of stature - and of feature list

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What else does the Liscio lack? Well, there’s no camera, for starters. This helps to keep the handset trim and give it a talk time of three hours, audio playtime of 11 hours and a standby life of about 200 hours. Its battery can be charged via the USB connection.

Bottom (top) and top (bottom)

Unlike a fair few basic handsets, the Liscio isn't a dual-band phone but a tri-band device. There's no Wi-Fi, of course, but the inclusion of Bluetooth means you can hook it up to a headset.

The Liscio’s ability to capture speech isn’t great - others weren’t always able to hear us clearly during tests. The phone’s small proportions could mean that the microphone is further away from your mouth and so less able to pick up sounds effectively than an average-sized mobile phone.

Anyone hoping to plan their daily life around the Liscio will be disappointed as it lacks any real organisational grunt, aside from a simplistic calendar, alarm and world clock. However, a hidden gem lies within the Tools folder: an app that allows short voice memos to be recorded, which is pretty handy if you don’t have a pen and paper to hand.

Onyx wants £130 for the Liscio, which means you're paying for the looks and size. If it's just a basic, secondary handset you want, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and co all have offerings priced at £30 and up. You can get two tri-band Nokias for the price of one, functionally equivalent Liscio.

But you may find it cheaper. The Liscio is the same phone Chinese manufacturer Haier put out as the Black Pearl back in 2006 and now widely available on eBay.

Verdict

Onyx’s Liscio is strong on looks, weak on features, but it fulfils the role of a secondary handset fairly well. But, for the price, we'd expect a phone to deliver much better call quality than this one does.